If we evolved from monkeys and evolution is true, then why are there still monkeys today?

Why does it have to be evolution vs creationism? Why can't an evolutionist believe in god? Why can't a christian believe in evolution? Those are the real questions. Why is there such a battle?

Originally posted by wayaboveitall
Maybe because there is only room for one (sentient) species like us on the planet.
Can you imagine several 'human' races? Hell, we dont even get along with each other.

[edit on 11-3-2010 by wayaboveitall]

Finally, we agree on something.

/me HighFives you !

Originally posted by amazing
Why does it have to be evolution vs creationism? Why can't an evolutionist believe in god? Why can't a christian believe in evolution? Those are the real questions. Why is there such a battle?

For the same reason there are Dems/Repubs, gay/straight, Methodist/Baptist, etc.

Mankind loves to be competitive.

reply to post by nomorecruelty


I respect your viewpoint, you are of course entitled to believe whatever you want. It's a right every person has in my opinion.

In respect to NDEs, it's something I don't attribute to God...and I had two of them so far. My heart stopped in a near drowning accident when I was 14, and three years later I was in a coma for 2.5 days during a severe case of meningitis and my heart stopped as well for a period of time. Both experiences were completely different, and the last things I remember are easily explained through oxygen deprivation and other biological processes...and they were similar to a drug induced trip.

Having said that, I don't claim to know if there's an afterlife, or what exactly happens when you die...just saying that in my experience, there was no proof for God or some guy telling me to go to hell because I'm a non-believer.

Alright, it's been fun tonight - for now I'm going to "evolve" myself toward the bed. My eyelids are heavy and the cat has already found his spot - I have to go reclaim mine from him.



G'nite all

Originally posted by nomorecruelty

Originally posted by amazing

For the same reason there are Dems/Repubs, gay/straight, Methodist/Baptist, etc.

Mankind loves to be competitive.

You're correct of course. We only see things as black and white. It's really not like that. we are all grey. All the time.

The answer to this question is simple. According to Darwin, it is survival of the fittest and smartest, so when you see George W Bush and then look at a monkey, it is obvious which one is the smartest and most likely to survive.

reply to post by aristocrat2


lol george bush.

anyaway nobody has said anything about the long message i had on page 6 i think it makes a good point

Alright, now forgive me if someone has mentioned this already but I thought I would clear something up. No one is saying that humans descended from apes as they are nowadays. What they are saying is that both us and apes descended from a common ancestor which was also a primate. That is what evolution says. That organisms can drastically change over a long enough time.

As much as most of us hate this fact,there is only one right and only one wrong,all shades in the middle are BS.

There doesnt seem to be a way to determine which is which,until now.

All things are possible but dont happen concurrently in one reality.

If you reverse extrapolate ANY COMMUNICATION BETWEEN HUMANS OR RECORDED BY HUMANS YOU CAN ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY DETERMINE THE TRUTH.

Once you disregard all of the trickery inherant in any language and you master the art of interpreting perspectives,you to can learn to reverse extrapolate and change your own life forever.The bible was my training ground when I was nine.

One of my relatives founded a new age religon with followers numbering in the millions worldwide,he was a shister,who simply didnt want to live a conventional life and jumped on the jesus bandwagon and was great at what he did,he to was a master at reverse extrapolation which is how he managed what he did.I know this because I am an apple that fell from a tree in the same orchard except I was abducted several times as a child and I KNOW WHAT WAS REAL FOR ME AND HOW TO INCORPORATE IT INTO MY REALITY USING REVERSE EXTRAPOLATION.

Different races of humans we arent familiar with ,very different but all very humanoid.No green men,no insectiods or bigfoots,just weird types of people.


How does god fit in,well if they havent figured it out yet how could we??The people who abducted me are technology based like us,they arent angels and they are as sentient as we are.

I thought I was grounded when I could see through religon at nine but let me tell you how grounded you get when you already see through religons BS as a kid but then are gifted with the new perspective I recieved through abductions.I literally went to the moon.I learned how we can use our minds to physically move things.


God?Come on,we arent ready to confront our own history beyond the information in the doctrines we worship that are actually bastardised history books,when we are able to digest this simple history we will be ready to try to conceptualise our creation,but right now because of the damages religons have afflicted upon humanity we cant concieve of anything but religous perspectives as misrepresented to us in the bastardised history books.

manimal,I am saying that primates today are ALMOST IDENTICAL to the primates that we were modified from and this is because the rest of the primates not modified continued uninteruppted on their natural evolutionary course ,and because EVOLUTION IS SO SLOW,todays monkeys and apes are almost identical to the ones we were created from,to the degree that we can simply identify the DNA differences in our geonomes and remove the extras we humans have AND ADD THEM TO A CURRENT PRIMATE ,and then we will have us,we will be god.

Primates here were evolving as designed,undoubtably designed to do.

We interrupted their path and kicked them like a million years ahead ,but this is the catch,we kicked them up to where they would have gotten anyways on their own in time.This is why we stopped evolving and have begun to devolve as a species our gene pool becomes more and more diluted due to insane population increases.

This is where that common ancestor joke comes from,WE ARE OUR OWN ANCESTOR AND ARE TO STUPID TO SEE IT.

Evolution has been proven false (is only a theory). Evolution can be divided into two parts, macro and micro. Micro evolution is a fact, where as macro evolution remains a theory due to debates on the exact steps of the evolutionary process. EVOLUTION DID HAPPEN we simply can’t trace the exact evolutionary steps of the of the 3 trillion plus species on earth. Considering there is no way that we can even prove if we have located all the species on earth, this may always remain a theory. We can prove though, beyond a doubt, that humans have evolved. We can trace it back conclusively 3.6 million years. 97% of all scientists accept evolution (so does the Catholic Church). Christians have spread lies about this excessively, they especially like to say evolution preaches that Humans evolved from monkeys. Evolution does not state that humans evolved from monkeys, that idea is completely absurd. Science states that monkeys and humans evolved from a shared forefather and are hence relatives, (all primates are) but we are in no way direct descendants of them.

evilbible.com

Originally posted by Hoppinmad1
You say apes split off and evolved on their own. That we share a common ancestor. Why haven't they advanced to be intelligent. They have existed longer than humans if humans apparently evolved from the same ancestor why haven't they became intelligent themselves. Scientists have tried endlessly to get species especially those with short life cycles to evolve in the lab. Such as fruit flies. They have never succeeded. That is because you only have genes of a fruit fly not some other creature therefore it can't evolve into another totally separate animal.

[edit on 31-8-2004 by Hoppinmad1]

I can answer this for you in three words... "STANDING ERECT" and "PROTEIN".

At one point in time in the very distant past, during the time that all primates were one animal (early primates = EP), the EP lived in trees due to the danger of predators on the ground. When the jungles of Africa receded to more grasslands and the bordering jungles thinned out, EP spent more time on the ground. Somewhere, sometime, one or a couple of EP found that if they stood on their hind legs, they could see over the tall grass of the grasslands and could spot food and danger at great distances. Any food that was spotted in the grasslands, pretty much were carcasses from the kills of other animals (by this time, EP where omnivores, but primarily ate roughage and fruits).

As the EP became used to standing upright on greater occasions, they were able to find and consume more meat. Over generations, the EP families that spent more time on the ground and upright, the connection of the spine to the skull shifted in order to allow for the ease of standing on hind legs. As the spine shifted down and the consumption of more protein than the tree dwelling EP, their brains grew in size (the brain is nothing more than a hunk of protein, it has been proven that vegetarians have brain shrinkage do to lack of meat protein).

Like shoving your foot in a closing door, then slowly shoving in more of your leg so the door won't close, the growth of the brain forced and kept the spine from receding back to it's original position. The more we stood up , the more EP's spine shifted, the more protein we ate, the more EP's brain grew, the more our spine was kept from receding, which allowed EP to stay on their hind legs longer, this allowed them to travel farther, run, and find more food at a longer distance from the safety of the trees, eventually beginning to kill small game on their own. Eating more protein, growing the brain, shifting the spine standing up longer, and so on and so forth.

The larger brain led to higher thinking, the use and creation of simple tools (basically sticks and rocks). More protein, the more complex the brain of the EP became, until this family of EP had finally diverged from the original family of EP.

This is the basic of all basic answers to your question. Of course the details are vastly more complicated, but that's basically how it happened.

On a side note, you want an example of short term evolution?? When the body adapts to external influences?? When you get a suntan when you stay out in the sun to long. if you go barefoot outside, you will get calluses on the bottom of your feet. If your family were to stay in an area of above average warmth and sunlight, the skin of the proceeding generations will get darker, and maintain it's color. Simply put, that's why Africans are dark, and Europeans are light (lack of direct sunlight). That's it, nothing more.

I have a tough time with any claim that various species of animals (humans included) evolved from another species. Sharing some common DNA is another story altogether. I believe that if this were true, you would see physical common characteristics, such as knuckle dragging humans, or humans covered in black fur, or some other evidence supporting the in-between stages of evolution. On earth there are million of species of animals that are grouped into their taxonomic rankings, etc but they all seem unique in terms of their development. It would seem to me that among these millions of species, you would see better evidence of the stages of evolution. I have seen these pictures in textbooks where they show half a dozen images of monkey morphing in man, and in each pic representing a different stage of evolution. Why don't we see some of these other stages? Are we saying that the monkey to man evolution occurred all at once? Are we saying that humans are fully evolved? For me, there are too many differences between monkeys and men with no stages in-between. While humans can be ranked into subspecies based on the color of their skin or other features like the shape of their heads, we dont see humans with fur or hand-feet with thumbs swinging from trees. Seems to me, that in order for evolution to be 100% proven, you would have to have evidence of generational changes. If this were somehow explained as natural selection of certain traits, it is beyond control of species to select the traits they are born with.

If natural selection were somehow dictated by a species, you would see much more specific diversity of traits. (For example, humans with fur, or wings, eyes in the back of their head, etc). If a specific trait were required due to environmental changes, who or what dictates specific changes of the evolutionary process? At some point the the actual change has to occur so that the offspring of a species would differ from the parents. If this were to happen for example (losing fur) for a particular offspring, such change would not necessarily occur for the remainder of the population or their offspring. If the trait for a single hairless monkey indeed occurred at some point in history, surely we would have evidence of this to support the evolution from monkey to man. Why wouldn't a monkey evolve into some other species other than man? Why would evolution have a specific target species? There may be subtle changes to a species, but for a drastic evolutionary change to go from monkey to man is pretty absurd without a whole variety of other intermediate species to bridge the gap. The point I am trying to make here is that if take evolution occurring over thousands/millions of years, there is a large span of time that would have yielded more intermediate offspring and those intermediates would have their own lineage down the line to present day. If the most reasonable explanation is that natural selection took out the intermediates, then why didn't that same process take out monkeys and apes too.

Another thing that is puzzling is that typically we see species breeding and reproducing offspring of the same species and pair-bonded... that applies to most all species that I am aware of. In other words, you don't see geese mating with ducks, or dogs mating with cats. Animals crossbreeds are pretty much a result of human intervention with nature. If the gap between monkey and man were a result of cross-breeding, you still have to have an original human and some evidence of the common hybrid species. If you look closely at the hominid fossils, if it pretty easy to tell which skulls are monkey and which are human and those skulls which are dated at 2M years old, there are examples of both human and monkey skulls and it is pretty easy to tell the difference between sapiens, erectus, and the monkey like skulls. Unfortunately, those old bones only tell part of the story and yield more questions than answers. Those bones older bones (and there are very few) dating back to 6M years very much look like monkey bones to me, but there are very few skulls unearthed that are dated in that 2M-6M year window

I was taught evolution in school, and some of the other theories (including religion) came later in my life. These days, I am more open to the idea that life very well could have been transplanted to Earth (panspermia/exogenesis theory) which back in the day, was never mentioned. It very well could be that the same meteors that killed the dinosaurs, delivered the seeds of human and other life. All of these theories and religious beliefs are a little far fetched by alot can happen during the 4.5B years on this planet. Since there are millions of species on the planet, I can hardly support the idea they all evolved from a single-cell in primordial ooze. You may be able to explain some of lifes origins from that theory, but ever since NASA discovered Streptococcus mitis bacteria living inside the camera of the Surveyor 3 spacecraft (from Apollo 12)... I have pretty much concluded life exists elsewhere in the universe and is capable of surviving the trip.

Originally posted by menjo2000

On a side note, you want an example of short term evolution?? When the body adapts to external influences?? When you get a suntan when you stay out in the sun to long. if you go barefoot outside, you will get calluses on the bottom of your feet. If your family were to stay in an area of above average warmth and sunlight, the skin of the proceeding generations will get darker, and maintain it's color. Simply put, that's why Africans are dark, and Europeans are light (lack of direct sunlight). That's it, nothing more.

Short Term Evolution? A contradiction in terms. In biology, evolution is the change in the inherited traits of a population of organisms through successive generations.

I don't think these are good examples... If this were true, then people in South America at the same longitude as Africa would have the same skin color, and black babies would be born white. Color of skin is a genetic trait that is passed to offspring, and I do not believe Callus development cannot be passed genetically.



[edit on 11-3-2010 by mapsurfer_]

[edit on 11-3-2010 by mapsurfer_]

reply to post by mapsurfer_


We do have humans covered in fur. Human beings have the exact same number of hair follicles as chimps, but our genes for mass hair production have laid dormant since it didn't help us at all when we were stalking the savannah looking for tasty antelope to eat.

Every animal is an "in-between", as no creature on the face of the planet has side-stepped natural selection. Some are sufficiently perfected in their environ to not be selected against in any overbearing fashion, meaning their genome will stay relatively constant.

Those diagrams of "monkeys evolving into man" are old, and don't show all the stages. If they did, the diagram would be a kilometre long.

There are no human "subspecies", as every human is almost genetically identical to each other, and we can all inter-breed fine, producing viable offspring. Those are the defining characteristics of a species.

I could go on and on and on dissecting your erroneous claims and lack of knowledge on the subject. Honest question: were you taught it at school? Here's a refresher, as it seems you really, really need it.

reply to post by muppet


That still doesn't explain the different level of intelligence. There are many breeds of dogs, but they mostly all share the same level of intelligence. Same with monkeys. The same question remains unanswered. Science has failed to produce the "missing link" so to speak.

reply to post by sickofitall2012


Of course it does. Apes are very intelligent. They have culture, and can even produce complex sentences in communication.

We only appear more intelligent than apes because we can pass down the learnings from one person to another, from one generation to another, in complex ways (without losing information). Apes can't do that - if one figures out a way to make a better tool, unless they can show it to another ape, and the second ape figures out what makes it better (and how to make it), then that knowledge is instantly lost. If the second ape learns how to do it, but then both the first and second apes are killed by hunters/other apes, then the discovery is lost. Humans simply write things down, or before that, had a verbal tradition of the older generation informing the younger.

The difference between apes and humans, in that respect, is simply a small notch in our vocal chords that allows us to produce a wide range of sounds, with great control. We have that, apes don't. Teach an ape sign language, however, and they'll be able to communicate just fine. They can even teach it to their offspring, and use it on their own.

Dog breeds are all one species - Canis lupus familiaris. Monkeys and apes are all different species. The two are not comparable. Also, dogs are not the result of natural selection, but of unnatural selection, namely breeding by humans.

We never evolved from monkies - we shared an ancestor with the monkies - tis different. Monkies are what we'd be if our genes evolved differently under different external stimuli. There.

reply to post by XHellcatX


Very true indeed. We are great apes, and the apes and monkeys share a rather-recent common ancestor.